The limits of virtue politics in an African context

Abstract

This paper situates Karl Popper's ‘paradox of tolerance’ as foundation within the context of interrogating multifaceted violent identity politics propagated in contemporary Nigeria. The paper argues that the ‘active’ virtue of tolerance which requires that subjects within the Nigerian polity engage each other in rationally-driven discourse on issues of dissent does not presume long-suffering or passive endurance of violence propagated by a side of the dissenting divide. It is thus pertinent that an appropriate intervention by the Nigerian state delineating the limits of tolerance in the face of perennial intolerance and the proliferation of violent identity politics is inevitable.